Our History of Titanic's Sinking Is All Wrong

The story of what caused the Titanic's sinking in 1912, which
killed 1,517 people and quickly becoming one of the most storied
disasters in modern U.S. history, has been accepted as an agreed-upon
fact for decades. The enormous passenger ship, the history books tell
us, was simply too big to safely navigate the Atlantic icebergs that
brought it down. But what if this account turned out to be based on
false testimony from the surviving crew?

British
novelist Louise
Patten writes in a new book, and has repeated in newspaper interviews,
that the Titanic crew took the real cause of the crash to their graves.
She says her grandfather, Charles Lightoller, the senior-most surviving
Titanic crew member, passed down a family secret: The Titanic was
sunk by poor steering. The New York Times' Robert Mackey
reports:

[Lightoller] told his wife that the man steering the ship when the
iceberg was spotted had simply turned the ship the wrong
way.

"Instead of steering Titanic safely round to the
left of the iceberg,
once it had been spotted dead ahead, the steersman, Robert Hitchins,
had panicked and turned it the wrong way," Ms. Patten said.

She added that her grandfather, who went on to become a war hero,
"was lying" when he told investigators looking into the cause of the
wreck that he had no idea what had happened. Ms. Patten said that the
ship's captain and first officer told Mr. Lightoller, the second
officer, about the steering error after the crash but he had concealed
the truth to protect the reputation of his employer.

Patten, talking to The U.K. Telegraph's Peter Stanford, explains the unusual moment in maritime
evolution and how the Titanic got it wrong:

Titanic was launched at a time when the world was moving from sailing
ships
to steam ships. My grandfather, like the other senior officers on
Titanic,
had started out on sailing ships. And on sailing ships, they steered
by what
is known as "Tiller Orders" which means that if you want to go one
way, you
push the tiller the other way. [So if you want to go left, you push
right.]
It sounds counter-intuitive now, but that is what Tiller Orders were.
Whereas with "Rudder Orders' which is what steam ships used, it is
like
driving a car. You steer the way you want to go. It gets more
confusing
because, even though Titanic was a steam ship, at that time on the
North
Atlantic they were still using Tiller Orders. Therefore Murdoch gave
the
command in Tiller Orders but Hitchins, in a panic, reverted to the
Rudder
Orders he had been trained in. They only had four minutes to change
course
and by the time Murdoch spotted Hitchins' mistake and then tried to
rectify
it, it was too late.

Fortunately, Patten's historic correction--if it's true--comes just in
time for Titanic
2, the unofficial sequel to the James Cameron film, to set the
national record straight. Here's the trailer:

This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.

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